The Avengers and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Year
by dysprositos
Summary: The worst year in Avengers history began in July 2013. For twelve straight months, they suffered injuries and illnesses at a statistically unlikely level that no one could explain. Whump/Hurt-Comfort. Featuring the whole team. Chapter 1: Clint. Sort-of companion to "Oblivious." On hiatus until further notice.
1. Prologue

Warnings: None, yet, this is the prologue.

Thanks to irite, for being the best beta ever…a month ago. Still is, but this was done a month ago.

So, this is a kind-of companion to "Oblivious" in which I go over, in agonizing detail, the Avengers' bad year as described in that fic. This is shameless whump/hurt-comfort with very little point besides.

Also, the first chapter's been done since the end of September, but there were nearly- insurmountable issues with posting (I'm neurotic enough to let something like picking 'characters' hold me up for over a month, okay?), and I haven't written the next chapters. I hate leaving things unfinished, so hopefully posting this will be an incentive to get moving.

I do not own The Avengers.

* * *

The worst year in Avengers history began in July 2013. For twelve straight months, they suffered injuries and illnesses at a statistically unlikely level that no one, not even Bruce and Tony with the combined force of their genius-level intellects, could explain. At the same time, the number of civilian casualties during battles skyrocketed. It didn't seem fair, that so much shit could go wrong _constantly_, but whenever they thought that they'd seen the end of their troubles, something new came along and slapped them in the face.

"But at least it's been a learning experience," Steve had pointed out, six months in.

Which was true. His optimism still fell very, very flat in the face of the disasters that had been plaguing them.

The first victim of their bad luck streak was Clint.


	2. Chapter 1: Clint

Warnings: some not-very-graphic descriptions of injuries, language.

irite is as awesome as she was in the prologue.

Disclaimer: I am _so_ not a doctor. All medical stuff is completely made up.

I do not own The Avengers.

* * *

It was just pure chance that he hadn't been killed. The ten or so civilians he'd been trying to herd out of the building hadn't been so lucky. When the grenade had gone off, it had taken out a weight-bearing column and half of the roof of the restaurant they were evacuating had just come down on top of them. Steve had taken care of the terrorist who had thrown the damn thing while Tony and Thor frantically shifted debris so that the paramedics could get in and do what they could.

In most cases, that hadn't been much. Most of the civilians had been killed, crushed by the falling roof or blown up by the grenade. Two had survived, but of them, one succumbed to his injuries in the ambulance and the other hadn't made it through the night in the ICU.

But Clint had been fortunate, and through some combination of dumb luck and the new body armor that Tony had designed for him, he had escaped what seemed like certain death. Thor and Tony had found him under an overturned table, and aside from a superficial cut on his face, he'd actually seemed...okay. Until Tony had grabbed his arm to pull him into the open and Clint had _shrieked_.

Tony had wisely abandoned that plan, and Thor had reached for Clint's other arm, but that elicited a very similar response. Except it was just a high-pitched whine the second time, the archer's capacity for anything louder apparently spent.

Tony and Thor looked at each other helplessly, then at Clint. They gave up on their attempts to move him, instead opting to wait for medical assistance.

His injuries were revealed when the paramedics came and cut his shirt off, revealing the swelling and bruising painting a grisly picture across his chest, from his shoulders down and around his left side.

They loaded Clint into an ambulance, and the next time Tony saw him, it was several hours later, and Clint was loaded up on morphine and laying in a hospital bed with his arms strapped down to his sides with strong elastic bandages.

"I have so much metal in me, they're going to have to start calling _me _Iron Man," he'd slurred, looking both delighted at the idea and very, very stoned.

As it turned out, being thrown across a room and then crushed under a falling roof can do a number on your pectoral girdle, and Clint had managed to break both of his clavicles, each in multiple places. The doctors had put him back together using a combination of metal plates and screws. Normally, broken collar bones would be treated with a sling or a special brace, but since both shoulders were out of commission (and neither could bear any weight) the doctors had gotten a little creative in their treatment, and Clint consequently ended up looking a bit like a mummy.

They said that he would have to stay that way for at least three weeks. Six, if he couldn't manage to stay immobile and let things heal correctly.

Apparently, he'd also ruptured his spleen when he'd been crushed, and the doctors hadn't been able to repair it, opting for removal instead. Clint didn't seem to be feeling the loss.

"Who cares? I don't even know what that thing did anyway!" he exclaimed while jabbing happily at the button on the morphine pump that someone had been considerate enough to leave near his hand.

Three days later, when he'd been released from the hospital, his good cheer had largely evaporated. This might have had something to do with the switch from IV morphine to oral codeine. Or perhaps it had to do with the fact that he had become suddenly and unexpectedly paraplegic and now had to figure out how to live that way in a non-hospital environment.

"Don't move your arms if you can help it," the doctor had instructed Clint while showing the assembled Avengers how to wrap the elastic bandages around Clint's torso so that his shoulders were immobilized correctly. "Any movement at all will be detrimental to the healing process."

And Clint had smirked and assured the doctor that he would enjoy having his doting friends take care of his every need immensely, and so he would most certainly not be moving _at all_.

That was entirely bravado. Clint, despite having worked with the others for over a year, struggled with trusting them. He hadn't been big on trust pre-Loki. Post-Loki, it was something that he'd largely eliminated from his life-he couldn't even trust himself, so how the _fuck _could he trust anyone else? Part of him knew it was illogical, but the way he figured, it was one thing to trust someone to watch your back in a fight. It was something else entirely to let them see you at your weakest, when you're exposed and vulnerable. That was dangerous, could only go badly. He thus had no intention of letting the others (except Nat, _maybe_) help him beyond the bare necessities.

Resolutely, Clint set out to handle his recovery on his own.

Which was a challenge for a number of reasons. Eating, for one, was complicated. Within three days of his release, Clint was seeing exactly how many things could be made into smoothies that he could then consume with a straw. When he got tired of that, he just said 'To hell with it' and used his damn arms. Until Bruce caught him. The physicist had made a small, thoughtful sound before ducking out of the kitchen. He returned two hours later with a small robot that was programmed specifically for spoon-feeding. With a nervous shrug, Bruce had simply said, "Seemed like you needed the help. More than Tony needed another toy, anyway."

Clint had been so surprised that he hadn't even said 'thank you.'

Another challenge was changing and showering, which were rendered nearly impossible. By Clint's fourth day back at the Tower, Tony had taken it upon himself to sneak into Clint's rooms and to install custom-designed voice-controlled bathroom fixtures. They were really fucking cool, but did little to help the fact that Clint could not get into or out of his clothing to use them.

Despite that, Clint found the gesture oddly touching.

Still, he needed to be able to dress himself, and so he decided 'To hell with it' on that, too, and went about dressing and undressing as slowly and carefully as possible. T-shirts, as it turned out, posed a particular challenge, one that only his flexibility born from years of training (first in the circus, then with SHIELD) could overcome.

Natasha had come across him struggling into a pair of pants one morning ("Christ, Nat, don't you ever _knock_?") and had, with no comments at all, buttoned and zipped them before telling him about the debriefing that had been scheduled for 10:00. As she turned to walk away, she said, "It's okay to ask for help, Barton."

And he was finding, slowly, that maybe it was. He started letting her help him with getting dressed.

In short, the actual physical logistics of the situation were a nightmare. But everyone could have dealt with that easily, between Bruce and Tony's ingenuity and the tireless helpfulness of the others. Because they were more supportive than Clint ever could have imagined, and they didn't rub his weakness in his face, just did everything they could to make sure he could do what _he _needed to do.

Except that the logistics weren't the biggest problem. The biggest problem was something else entirely.

Being laid up gave Clint a lot of time to think. And as it turned out, his thoughts were more of a burden than the physical limitations imposed by having his arms strapped to his sides. He was slowly learning to ask for help with that burden, but his thoughts...those were his to bear, alone. He did a poor job of it.

Because something about watching eleven (the exact death toll, he'd found out during the debriefing) people be crushed and/or blown up directly in front of you when you're meant to be saving them stuck with him. And that was just eleven lives _ended_. How many had been _ruined_? He could tally the number of lives he'd ended, did it often, in vivid detail, but he could not know how many lives he had ruined by letting others die.

The first time his thoughts had wandered down that particular path had been a week after the incident. It made him sick to admit it, but he hadn't even thought about the people who had been in the blast with him until then. They had faded from his memory, lost somewhere between the codeine and the daily struggle involved with doing mundane things like putting on a t-shirt.

The story had been on the news, though. Apparently, one of the people who had been killed (the target of the terrorists, as it turned out...Clint thought that maybe he should start listening to Steve's briefings more closely) had been some grassroots organizer working against some proposed law, and his followers were holding a memorial for him later that day. Clint had taken note of the time and location, and had, with great effort, forced himself into a dress shirt, nice pants, shiny shoes. When Natasha had come up to wrap his shoulders, she'd seen his outfit and insisted on accompanying him.

"You're ridiculous, Barton," she'd said, and Clint had agreed, but it was the least he could do, really. If you get someone blown up, it just seemed polite to go to their memorial service.

He stayed at the back of the crowd for the whole thing, the effort of remaining standing for that long nearly undoing him. He'd left as soon as he could, abandoning Natasha in the hallway outside of his room and curling up on his bed with a bottle of Jack Daniel's, a straw, and a crushing sense of guilt that no matter how many times people said "it's not your fault, Barton," could not be relieved.

So that had been the first time.

His mind had wandered down that path a few more times during the second week of his recovery, and each time had ended the same way, with him nursing a bottle of liquor. Until the rest of the team figured out what was going on, anyway, and put a stop to it.

"This isn't going to fix anything, Barton," Tony told him, picking the bottle up off the table and removing the straw. "First, I have had _way _more practice than you with drinking myself into a coma, and I can say definitively that it fixes nothing. Second, this is fucking Jack Daniel's, and that cheap-ass shit isn't nearly good enough to drown your sorrows in."

Bruce picked the cap for the whiskey bottle up off the table and reached for the bottle in Tony's hand, but Tony dodged him, sidling in next to Thor.

Ignoring them, Steve suggested, "You could just _talk _about what's on your mind," like it was that fucking easy. "It's not like it was your fault, what happened."

"Indeed, Barton, the guilt that you carry is not your burden alone. For both Stark and I share the blame equally with you, I think, for the deaths of those innocents."

Tony clapped Thor on the arm with one hand while taking a swig of Clint's whiskey with the other. "Thanks, Point Break. Really needed to hear that. So, Barton. Stop with the no-armed pity-party, 'kay? Next time you feel like having a drink, let me know and I'll get you something better than this shit."

Natasha had rolled her eyes at that. "Stark. Not helpful."

"Hey, just offering."

But Clint knew suddenly that under the facetious exterior was a serious offer. Not of liquor, although Stark would surely deliver on that, too. No, it was an offer of support. And the others...they had all come up here, hunted him down, engaged in this little intervention, even though it was awkward as hell and he was half-drunk and somehow all of that added up to the fact that maybe, just maybe, he could trust these people. Fully. He already trusted that they cared about him as a member of the team, as an assassin. How much harder could it be to trust that they cared about him as a person, that they wouldn't turn on him at the first sign of weakness?

Well, fuck, they hadn't done it yet. And there'd been plenty of damn chances recently. So maybe he _could _let his guard down.

It was a terrifying realization, but Clint had ample opportunity to try. His x-rays at the end of three weeks showed that his excessive movement during the first weeks of healing had kept his bones from mending like they should have. The doctor added another two weeks in the bandages, plus one week of minimal movement, to Clint's treatment plan.

And by the end of those three weeks, Clint had come to trust the others implicitly, because they had stepped up and helped him in ways that he had not even thought to imagine they could. He was left in awe of Tony and Bruce's creativity, Natasha's burgeoning maternal instinct, Thor and Steve's boundless patience. More stunning, though, was the way that all of them just _understood_ about the guilt, about feeling _helpless_ and _useless_. Because they'd all been there, at one point or another, and maybe _that _was the true benefit of being part of a team. The support they could give each other once the battle du jour had ended.

So it was a tighter, more cohesive group that emerged on the other side of Clint's injury, with the archer himself drawn more tightly into the fold than he'd ever thought he would be.

The next ten months would see the closer bonds between them tested. Starting almost immediately. Because two weeks after Clint started physical therapy, Natasha became the next victim of the bad luck streak.

* * *

Thanks for reading! Someday, there might be more of this.


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